“Hot Cottons” is Dutch artist Magali Reus’ first solo exhibition in
Scandinavia, and her largest solo exhibition to date. The exhibition features a
comprehensive group of new sculptures, presented within a bespoke exhibition
architecture that reveals itself through a series of spatial chapters.
Magali Reus creates sculptural objects that are seemingly recognizable, often
appropriating the symbolism of ordinary objects from our immediate
surroundings. In the detailed and meticulously produced surfaces of the
sculptures, conventionally analogue gestures have been reproduced with complex
casting and moulding techniques: autographs of famous athletes, graphics from
an iconic Norwegian matchbox, as well as ornaments and details from
architecture and industrial design. Throughout, there is a flourish of
mechanisation relocated to the hand-touched. The result is objects that appear
with an unclear, unsteady identity; between the commonplace and the hyper real.
Reus relates to seeing by studying the slightest details in the world that
surrounds us. She introduces a distance and a delay in the reading of objects
and images. Images do not necessarily coincide with their expected material
properties. The objects appear mediated and modified, just as our screen-based
culture’s rendering of reality is always an edited – and often manipulated –
version of the world.
The exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall consists of several new series of works.
One, titled Sentinel, shares certain characteristic features with fire
extinguishers. Hanging on the wall and set strictly beside each entrance or
doorway, each is poised as if it might be a functional part of the interior.
Another series, titled Hwael, employs the visual language of both
classical decorative ironwork and modular frameworks. These are distributed
through the exhibition galleries in the rhetorical manner of a fragmented whale
skeleton. The effect is ruinous, yet in progress. Mounted on the skeletal
frameworks, the visual motif of a backpack acts as a signifier for the
transport of goods of an undefined content. As a thing the bag represents a
kind of typological form whose manifestations, despite endless variations, also
share certain mutual properties: its bodily connection, the outside shell of
acting as protective membrane for the non-uniform content of its insides.
All the objects appear to the viewer in what seems to be a state of motion, in
transition between different temporal stages; frozen in the process of becoming
(mid-render), caught in the midst of a function (mid-use), or in a state of
restoration, ruin or abandonment. Through a working process of continual
accumulation and erasure Reus deliberately sets the idea of transitory status
against what we claim to recognize, creating framing devices that ask new
questions about the symbolic relevance of things we are so keen to define.
There is frequent multiplication in Reus’ works. Throughout the exhibition,
variations on similar objects appear; in different places, on different scales
and with varying degrees of detail. Like teeth, bricks or rows of houses, they
enact the formal grammar of an object obviously connected to a larger and more
purposeful system or logic. Her work considers the way comic exaggeration or
stylized appropriation can shift the rhythm of the decoding of a surface by a
viewer. Oversized or imitative forms might therefore be said to be performing,
and in this way Reus’ work can be linked with conversations of material
flirtatiousness, of sexuality or gender.
The extensive production of new works that makes up “Hot Cottons”
will also appear in her subsequent exhibition at the South London Gallery in
2018.
